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Symbian kernel finds freedom ahead of schedule

Originally scheduled for nine months hence, the Symbian development team has announced that it has now released the micro-kernel of its mobile phone operating system under the open source Eclipse Public License (EPL).

A Symbian Foundation Blog post notes that it was not changing the license notices in the source code that took several months, but rather putting together a development environment with an ARM simulator and developing a completely open source base port for a low cost Beagleboard.

The Symbian micro-kernel offers multitasking and symmetric multiprocessing. Developers can download a "kernel taster kit" to help them get started with text shell builds. The kit should, among other things, be sufficient for driver development.

In future, the development team is planning to concentrate on the GCC compiler and the ARM CPU's energy-saving Thumb2 technology.